The Industry You Love to Hate

The thing about mainstream media coverage of public relations is that it is really rare for an article to take more than a glancing look into our corner of the world, so when it happens it sends the industry and its friends and foes into a frenzy of self-reflective hyper-analysis of the piece and its implications.

When Sunday’s New York Times business section featured a cover story about the PR game in Silicon Valley, I knew it was just a matter of time before the blog posts and tweets in response would send my Blackberry skittering across the table. And my people did not disappoint.

From the “PR guy” quoted in the piece who breathlessly explained in a 2,000-word treatise complete with pretty charts and graphs how his one comment that made it into the story fit into the context of a 90-minute conversation with the reporter (we’ve all been there, Brian). To Michael Arrington, the influential founder of TechCrunch, who was dissed by the client in the story as “cynical” and therefore worthy of avoidance, ginning up his already outsized, um, cynicism about PR people (thanks, Brooke, that was really helpful). And eponymous agency head Richard Edelman, who used his blog to debunk the hackneyed PR myths propagated by the article. The hue and cry is ringing across the PR world with everyone – from an understandable if largely self interested perspective – taking issue with this or that or every part of the story.

Truth be told, the article was infuriating. Ostensibly about the new way of doing PR for technology startups, it was really just another damning profile of insincere publicist as latter day Sidney Falco conducting business by vapid social engagement rather than research, strategy, intellect and hard work. It was, quite simply, the inexplicably enduring caricature of the smarmy PR person, which drives so many smart people in this business to fits of self-loathing defensiveness. Like the notion that every politician is corrupt or every lawyer wants to bleed you dry, the portrayal of the PR person as the obsequious, sell-your-soul deal-maker hurts as much as it is ridiculously inaccurate. There are publicists – and politicians and lawyers – who give the rest of us a bad name, but they do not define the industry.

So permit me a moment to address a few of these inaccuracies (from a self interested perspective, of course)…

The customer is not always right. The story’s publicist-protagonist (or at least the reporter’s version of her) gets off on the wrong foot by caving instantly and completely to the client’s concerns about tech bloggers. We are hired as communications counselors, not just implementers, and we owe it to our clients (and their clients) to provide strategic advice based on research, instinct and experience. That’s exactly what most of us do – the successful ones at least.

Social media is a critical component of today’s PR toolbox, but not the only one. PR campaigns that ignore the transformative effect new media tools have had on communications do so at their own peril. But those who completely abandon the power of the media – print, electronic and online – to help tell a story are just as lost.

All pitches are not created equal. The claim that reporters have no use for publicists is a tired old canard. I have no doubt that some reporters believe that all publicists are unimaginative nuisances, but this reminds me of polls that show Americans have low opinions of Congress, but a high opinion of their own congressman: the PR person who got me the answer I was looking for on deadline, connected me to the source I needed for my story, and alerted me to the trend in the first place is a good guy…unlike those other PR people. The truth is a thoughtful, creative PR person is a valuable resource to reporters, and those reporters know it – though they may only cop to it in the deep, dark recesses of their brains.

This last point gets right to the fundamental question raised by the Times article: why does just about every profile of a PR person in the mainstream media seem to begin with the premise that publicists are parasitic bottom-feeders? Maybe people in the news business are loathe to give PR folks their due because it disturbs the myth of the newsman who fights for every break in the story. Or maybe it’s not the reporters at all, but the PR subjects who are chosen (or self-select). After all, the results of a good PR job will be far more engaging than the process behind it, which makes for happy clients but bad copy.

But it may not matter all that much in the end since one fairly obvious take-away from the Times story is the principle that PR – whatever our disagreements about how it’s defined and who’s providing it – is a vital part of a product launch. I suppose a rising tide lifts all boats, even if some of them may not be especially sea-worthy.

Matthew Traub is managing director and chief of staff at DKC

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.